SSD And Tiering Will Alter The Storage Media Mix

Storage management is a complex balancing act of reducing the cost of delivery without jeopardizing the performance and availability of key business applications and data. The advent of flash-based solid state disk (SSD) for the enterprise has added another tool to the arsenal of the storage manager, but it is just one more step on the price-performance continuum. For extremely performance-sensitive environments, flash-based SSD will be a big shift, allowing higher performance with lower cost, floor space, and power consumption. For most environments, though, SSD will make tiering more complicated with yet another decision point for data placement. SSD remains far more expensive than spinning disk, and while the price is declining, so too is the cost of hard drives. Lower your total costs by using automated tiering tools with SSD to shift the media mix away from high-performance hard drives toward lower-performance, higher-density drives. But note that with mapping your app requirements, SSD may increase the cost of the storage environment with minimal real performance improvement.